There are plenty of ways Meyers could mock him—and he did. But while some late-night hosts might just move onto the next joke, Meyers went on to make the bigger point that Shkreli is far from the only person in pharmaceuticals who is price-gouging drugs astronomically.

It’s the sort of politics-laced hot take that Meyers has become known for in the two years since he’s joined the exclusive (albeit not very diverse) late-night club. The hosts have changed seats more than a dozen times in a two-year span, affecting nearly every available spot with the exceptions of Jimmy Kimmel Live and Conan, but sharp interviews and political know-how set Meyers apart. A political spin might rake in only a tenth the number of views as a game of musical beers with Ryan Reynolds and Katie Holmes, though. So where does that leave Late Night?

And Meyers? He’s a little harder to pin down. In the two years since he took over Late Night, he’s done something that nobody really expected: He turned it into a place people went to for their news, made a show that’s practically anti-late-night in every way, and become a terrific interviewer right under our nose and with the odds stacked against him. And with the 2016 election in full swing, it’s a hell of a time for him to to come into his own, too. But more people tune into Carpool Karaoke the morning after than will tune in for a thoughtful interview with a candidate.

Meyers is the late-night host we need right now, but not the one we deserve.

But unlike the other hosts, his most popular videos aren’t as great of a showcase of what he does best.

Strong suit

Late Night has always been weird. Letterman first had the show in 1982. The show’s had three more hosts since then, and each one brought something to the table that nobody else in late-night TV was doing. With less of an audience watching—it started at 12:37am, after some of the earlier shows’ audiences went to bed—the hosts have a little more creative freedom. Just look at what Craig Ferguson did on The Late Late Show, Late Night’s main television rival for more than 20 years.

On any given episode of Late Night, you never know what you might see.

Letterman, noted even back in the ’80s to be an “acquired taste” for audiences, brought out gags and wasn’t afraid to drop the politeness with a guest—making fans of pretty much everyone who came after him in the process. O’Brien had recurring sketches and guests such as the Masturbating Bear, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, insulting countries just to see where he aired, and putting Abe Vigoda through everything. Even back when Fallon played those variety games on Late Night just a few years ago, they felt fresh; now it’s become the late-night standard.

On any given episode of Late Night, you never know what you might see. Celebrities will always come on to promote their latest film or TV show, but in between that you could get pretty much anything. With Meyers, they’ve become conversational in a style that Ferguson excelled at—and with a lack of notecards full of talking points.

Meyers semi-regularly talks to authors about their books on the show—and not just household names. The Wall Street Journalnoted back in July that Late Night has “morphed into something of an intellectual salon” with Meyers sitting behind that desk because he brings in authors as well as celebrities and politicians.

Political leanings

Meyers’s strength with the interview didn’t come right away. Early reviews of Late Night with Seth Meyers were mixed, and critics complained that Meyers’s monologue sounded more like something from Weekend Update than an actual monologue. Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen offered similar criticisms on the monologue in his review a month later, but praised his chemistry with his guests. “A talk-show host good at talking?” Jensen wrote. “Fancy that.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise. Before hosting Late Night, Meyers was the head writer of SNL and anchored Weekend Update, where he often had to be on top of his political game. He’s a veteran of the 2008 and 2012 presidential election cycles, and he helped write one of SNL’s most iconic cold opens in the show’s modern era with Tina Fey and Poehler.

It’s in the 2016 presidential election cycle where Meyers has succeeded in ways that other shows with the experienced political-junkie host (Colbert’s The Late Show) or the shows geared toward political satire (Noah’s The Daily Show, The Nightly Show) have yet to achieve. And the best thing Meyers could’ve done to stand out from the rest was to sit down.

Taking a stand

As far as late-night news goes, it was pretty minor; it’s not like someone else announced a departure. But Seth Meyers doing a sit-down monologue, really?

On Aug. 10, Meyers opened his show with a monologue sitting down at his desk. He addressed the day’s headlines, like he did every night, but there were a couple of key differences. He wasn’t standing anymore—and the show used graphics to illustrate some of the stories he made jokes about.

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For longtime fans and observers of the format, it was practically unheard of; most late-night hosts have done standing monologues since Johnny Carson made it a staple on his Tonight Show. Aside from Noah, Wilmore, and Oliver (whose shows are satire more than specifically late-night), all of the other hosts do a standing monologue.

Meyers, who was going back to what he knew, certainly didn’t anticipate all of the reaction or think pieces that accompanied it.

“I’ve always felt comfortable at the desk,” Meyers told Grantland at the time. “I still do a lot of the show at the desk after the monologue, and it’s always been nice after the monologue to get back to the desk and sort of sit down and settle. In a weird way, we’re just moving that up five or six minutes.”

Six months later he’s still at that desk, and it’s been for the better.

The Stewart claim resonated with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who brought up the comparison to Meyers when he interviewed him a week later, noting that he loved the political bits Late Night had started doing on a more regular basis. Meyers, for his part, doesn’t think that “anyone will be an heir to Stewart” but admitted his show did take inspiration from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

“I do think that Jon and Stephen did, in a way, present this idea that audiences will consume this kind of, sort of political news as comedy—to which I think a lot of people have picked up on and it’s really fun to do. But, I think when we started the show we had this idea, we’ll do a lot of politics, and the reality was we were a new show and we didn’t quite know the best way to pull it together. So we were doing one a month, and then we got into one every two weeks, and now we’re at a place where … we’re getting kinda adept at doing that. So hopefully, 3-4 days a week we can pull that off.”

Meyers covers the election—and especially Trump—in his politically driven segments, which is practically a requirement for late-night humor. But he’s also doing what Oliver told Colbert that everyone should be doing: discussing the issues instead of the personalities driving the headlines.

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Five more years

In most cases, if you have a show that’s great with only so-so or terrible ratings, it’s probably going to get canceled. While late-night TV is on a lower curve than the primetime lineup in terms of expectations, it still matters. It’s what got Arsenio Hall and Pete Holmes’s respective talk shows canceled in recent years, after all.

Late Night With Seth Meyers isn’t tailor-made to go viral and doesn’t always have a snappy title, like pretty much anything The Tonight Show puts out. Just watch the previews that appear on NBC in the morning: They’ll list the guests and games that Fallon plays, but Meyers’ guests sometimes don’t even get a full mention. And Meyers certainly doesn’t have a two-year anniversary special coming up, whereas NBC just put a two-hour special full of Tonight Show highlights out for Fallon on Valentine’s Day.

Meyers is finally settling into his show that goes against the current grain of late-night TV, and he’s succeeding despite everything against him. It’s too early to determine whether his success will last beyond the 2016 election, which put him into the spotlight, but if the late-night hosts before him have proven, there will always be somebody’s fuck-up to mock and rip apart.

In the cold open for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the new weekly late-night show from the former Daily Show correspondent, Bee confronts the one thing that's dogged her for months: What’s it like being a woman in late-night?